Accounting for My Tastes in Beer

In between evenings of losing myself in my annual “big book” (Don Quixote this year), I’ve been reading Terry Theise’s What Makes Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime. Theise makes a compelling case that people who write about wine or who sell wine for a living be forthcoming with their readers and customers about their tastes.

Why Account for Taste?

It’s a simple premise: writers and critics should examine their taste proclivities so that their readers know where they stand. As Theise asserts, this is the first obligation of the critic, whether that person is writing about wine, beer, art, or music. It’s what buttresses our credibility. And, I’d add somewhat paradoxically, it’s what makes our judgments and pronouncements that much more “objective.” (More on that below.)

Unlike Theise, who’s a wine merchant, I’m not in the business of selling my readers beer. But like Theise, I’m also subtly (or maybe not so subtly?) trying to sell you on a particular vision of what beer is or can be, along with the kinds of experiences that make beer worth drinking. That’s why, I think, it makes sense to give you an account of what has shaped my tastes — the beer gardens, Wirtshäuser, beer hikes, beer regions, and beer cities I write so much about — in short, the places that transform the liquid in the bottle or glass into something more.

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Taste. It’s woefully subjective. There’s no accounting for it. But still, I’ll try. In this post, I consider taste broadly, reflecting on the cultural influences that shape taste in general, along with those that have shaped how I approach beer. In a subsequent post due out next week, I turn to the beers themselves.

Theise claims that giving such an account is useful for you, the reader. It’s a kind of exercise in transparency. I’m not sure that these general reflections and my subsequent exploration of the beers I like will be useful to you, but I hope you find them enjoyable and “in good taste.”

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Rating systems: Quantifying Taste

If you recall, I used to award exceptional beers one to three tankards. This was my concession to the general desire for ratings. I’ve never been a fan of ratings. It reduces beer to a number. And I’m even less a fan of crowd-sourced ratings. Be that as it may, I devised a system of sorts to signal to readers that a particular beer merited extra attention.

I’ve since quietly stopped awarding beers tankards, mainly because my system confused people. A brewer once fumed that I had awarded his beer a mere three tankards. To which I replied that three tankards were my highest compliments. Others wondered about all those other beers I wrote about but to which I didn’t award tankards. With very rare exceptions, those beers are very good, and worth trying.

At any rate, even if my tankard system appears to have fallen short of the mark, quantifying taste is not something I’ll embrace anytime soon. Even if I have to score beers for competitions, I just can’t bring myself to reduce beer to a number when I’m writing about it.

Objectivity in a Subjective Key

Beer is an aesthetic object — that is, something we deem good or bad, tasty or not worth drinking. Sometimes we even pronounce a beer beautiful or sublime. As such, beer is resistant to objectivity. We debate the merits of a particular style, or argue over a particular beer or brewery. But as Theise notes, “This doesn’t mean we can’t be objective at all, just that we need to recognize the ineluctable line between that and our inevitable subjectivities” (Theise, 60).

Taste has much more to do with what’s merely in the glass. Labels. Hype. Reputation. Our previous drinking experiences and relative “expertise.” Context. What is both in and on the bottle shapes our tastes beyond our taste buds and olfactory receptors.

Here’s where taste (as physiology) intersects with taste (as culturally coded judgment). Taste is a highly mediated sensuous pleasure. The sense of taste — and all those factors which influence our sense of taste before we even pronounce judgment on a beer — stymies attempts to arrive at anything resembling “pure” and objective aesthetic judgments.

Yet still we strive toward that noble dream of objectivity. Indeed, as beer writers and critics we have to, lest we sacrifice our credibility. As someone who writes about beer semi-professionally — or at least who strives to be professional about my beer writing — I drink all styles of beer, and I try to approach even those styles of which I’m less fond as objectively as I can.

I’m drinking beer at my place with a few friends. One of the IPAs on the table balances harmonious fruit and floral expressions with judicious bitterness and a honeyed malt profile with a touch of toast. It’s flawlessly executed for good measure. No hop burn. No muddled flavours. And well attenuated without the sticky sweetness that seems to cling to so many hazies. I’ve just described my ideal IPA. Those are my subjective tastes coming through.

Let’s assume my friends around the table are all hop heads, and all with discerning palates. They might prefer the more aggressively hopped IPAs, or dank ones, or juice bombs. But they nod in agreement with my take on this particular IPA: this is an “objectively good” beer, even as some of my friends argue for the other IPAs.

Now, American IPA might not be my favourite category of beer, but I attempt to hold my prejudices in abeyance and pronounce a disinterested judgment on the IPAs we’re drinking, albeit a judgment filtered through my own notions of what an ideal IPA should be. What just happened at the table is an example of what Immanuel Kant calls “subjective universality.” As you can see, this is far from the lofty ideal of objectivity, but it’s also far from the more banal proclamation that “all taste is subjective.”

Briefly on the Politics of Taste

Foregrounding your tastes invariably brushes up against the politics of drinking. Some claim that it’s about what’s in the glass, and that’s it. I don’t subscribe to that notion. Be it the food we eat, the car we drive (or don’t), or the beer we drink, our consumption choices are inherently political, even if unconsciously so. And it goes well beyond supporting the brewery down the street.

Suffice it to say, it’s a complicated issue that comprises a beer’s provenance (where it comes from and who brews it), how a brewery navigates social issues, or even how a brewery treats its employees. I don’t drink Founders and I don’t drink BrewDog for some of these reasons.

And then there’s Paulaner’s Salvator, one of the few Doppelbocks I can get reliably in Oklahoma. I enjoy drinking Salvator, and drink it often Stateside. It feels like I’m partaking of a little bit of history when I drink it. But Paulaner is owned by Heineken. When I’m in Munich, I gravitate toward Bocks brewed by independent entities like Ayinger and Andechs. Or I head over to Hop Dog for a selection of Bocks from small Franconian breweries that have been in the family for generations.

Framing Taste

It’s a sunny autumn afternoon and I’ve just arrived in the Oberpfalz, home of Zoigl. I immediately become part of a tableau with Zoigl in the picture, but one that’s also much more than just about the beer. The frame around the tableau encompasses the lively squares and ornate churches, the cobblestone streets that cradle those wonderful Zoigl taverns, the meadows and rolling hills, the colour of the leaves against the sky, the fragrance of the forest as I wander from town to town in search of my next Zoigl.

Does this have a bearing on the beer in the glass? Not directly. But the stuff that surrounds us contributes not only to a region’s culture in general, but also, in some small way, to its beer culture. Reflect upon it a little longer and you’ll start to notice how this culture shapes everything from the procurement of ingredients to decisions about how to brew — decoction, for example, or whether or not to use a coolship or conduct an open fermentation.

Being attentive to these cultural frames helps me paint a fuller picture when I sit down to write about a particular beer or brewery, and not only in traditional beer regions like the Oberpfalz or Franconia. The same holds true for Upper Bavaria, the Belgian countryside, and even the great beer cities of Europe. For me, Prague and Edinburgh are virtually unimaginable without their pubs, or Munich without its beer gardens.

Does all of this cultural stuff make the beer taste “better”? It’s a question I’ve grappled with for years. But the question misses the mark. Instead, it’s more a question of remaining attentive to how these cultural frameworks — from the Wirtshaus and the beer garden to the communal brewhouse and the coolship — have shaped both the beer of a given region and my own taste in beer. Context does matter. And it’s what mitigates against our tendency to reduce beer to a mere object to be evaluated, rated, and scored.

Pilsner Urquell isn’t my favourite Czech Pils, but drinking Urquell in the maze of caves beneath the brewery? That’s something else. Granted, the open-fermented Urquell served from wooden casks in those cavernous cellars isn’t what ends up in bottles, but the sheer experience of being in those caves affects my perception of the beer. Augustiner’s refreshing Märzen isn’t my favourite Central European beer, but just going to the Augustiner in Salzburg and participating in the ritual of selecting a mug, washing it out, and handing it to the man pulling beers from the barrel — this never gets old. And maybe it does make the beer taste a wee bit better.

Prost, everyone! Check back next week for Part II, which delves into the beers I like, and why.

Related Articles

For some earlier reflections on the topic of taste, check out the following posts from the archives:

Drinking Lager in an Age of Extreme Taste

The Uncritical Embrace of Craft Beer?

Tasting Against the Craft Beer Grain

Global Craft Beer on a Sea of IPA: Sameness Masquerading as Choice?

All images by F.D. Hofer

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